Treatment of the Good & the Worthwhile--& Dialectic

Treatment of The Good & The Worthwhile--& Dialectic

Moreover, in the above passage, the philosopher Lonergan speaks of an undertow, and an unconscious movement towards the good. This means that our reflective processes about the good (and bad) already spontaneously emerge in all but the comatose among us, and that they do so in terms of some developing set of principles of intelligence and excellence or, more generally, some movement of our embedded, but developmental, questions for the true-good (1972, pp. 282-83).

In other words, our questions for the good emerge within a horizon, and our horizons can change. As cultural and as developmental within a culture, our horizons differ vastly; but as desirers, questioners, and seekers of the good, we are all the same. In part, the unconscious undertow is our fundamental quest for the good, as concretely expressed and regardless of content, which is already part and parcel to all human endeavors. Again, though horizons and content differ greatly, the search for the good is trans-cultural.

In this way, when we speak of notions of correction and self-correction, we mean that both are inherently involved with our questions of analysis, qualification, self-qualification, and of value and self-value and, more comprehensively, of the true-good--all within a broader context of horizon development.

Furthermore, all commonsense and theoretical dialogue is underpinned by foundations and fundaments, and the interaction between them. If so, then all dialogue already holds within it the concrete evidence for the self-reflective process to begin—a process that aims at personal, philosophical self-correction—and qualification. In fact, in all human concerns, the broad structure of self-correction is ordered around our questions generally stated as: What/who is it, is it so, and is it good/bad/worthwhile (Lonergan, 1972; & Piscitelli, 1985). Through the framework of these questions, we continue to self-transcend at times, despite a profoundly disparate philosophical inheritance, and despite disagreement in our reflections on the question of what really is good-bad at any one moment in human history.

Again, though we all seek the good, we do so from profoundly different horizons and contexts. This diversity of views emerges as a dynamic polemic of soft differences and hard extremes, and as dialectical movements of inner thought and outer discourse where, in either case, we “go back and forth” over an issue; and we continuously change and self-correct. Such dialectical movements are concretely manifest in common discourse, for instance, as “separating the wheat from the chaff,” as “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” and as other references to winnowing out a discoverable clear truth and good in a highly complex arena of meaning.

I leave you to supply your own examples of the process of dialectic manifest in any specific dialogue. However, the same general structure of questioning and dialectic can be found in both writ-small and writ-large environments—in all persons, studies, fields, and theoretical work in a wealth of conferences, books and articles in field journals, and in political and ethical dialogue by concerned persons across the globe.

What is actually good or bad in any concrete situation is a question for all of us in that situation; however, the prior question for the good-bad is always the initial source of all argument-to-decision-making in that situation.

Thus, rather than "adding on" the question of the good to any analysis that we do, we will see that all critical analysis and argument emerge from, include, and return to the question of the good from whatever horizon the correspondents are working within. From this understanding of the good we can see that the need for a dialogue about horizon analysis comes clearly into view.